Want to transform government? Start with people
Shared lessons on modernizing hiring for tech talent
by: Angie Quirarte (Federal Partnerships Director, Tech Talent Project), Michelle Kwansy (Research and Design Strategy, Bloom Works), Rebecca Heywood (Government Team Lead, U.S. Digital Response), Alex Lawrence (Chief People Officer, City of Boston)
“The public sector workforce will shift our national conversation about how we deliver on the promises of government.”
— Jen Pahlka — Author of Recoding America
The annual Code for America Summit brings together civic-minded technologists dedicated to improving government services. For years, the summit has been a place to plant the seeds of positive change for the public interest technology community. Over time, the conversation has evolved to focus more on building capacity and empowering public service teams — the people that make this important work possible.
As many of us have experienced, hiring in government is hard and hiring for tech talent feels harder. But why?
At this year’s summit, we (Angie, Michelle, Rebecca, and Alex) led a session to begin an open dialogue on developing shared principles to modernize government hiring and recruiting.
This conversation started because several cities and states are rethinking their hiring and recruiting systems and processes. What challenges are they facing ? What steps are they taking? What’s working so far? How might we learn from each other’s mistakes and successes? Based on our collective knowledge, can we establish shared principles to guide this work?
In the spirit of mutual learning, we are sharing our draft principles to modernize hiring and stories from our experiences doing so across levels of government through this multi-part blog series.
The principles
The public interest tech community is often driven by principles in delivering services. We believe the same approach should apply to government talent. Our current hiring systems follow principles that don’t fully meet our needs today. The principles below are actions that government teams can use to transform how we approach talent in the digital age:
- Use urgency to drive action
- Identify your levers of change and engage your key partners
- Ask why until the trail ends
- Bring stories and proof to back them up
- Understand the history and the why
- Focus on serving internal staff’s goals to gain buy-in
- Define the problem
- Pilot and test before you scale
Join the conversation
If you’ve been exploring ways to modernize hiring and recruiting- let’s chat! The CfA session and this blog series is the beginning of a conversation. We welcome other voices and want to share your lessons learned with this growing community.
- You can view our presentation from Code for America.
- Follow Rebecca’s weekly newsletter on tech and innovation jobs in government at the #PublicSectorJobBoard.
- Encourage your network to join the Tech to Gov network and attend the upcoming events.
The next post will focus on the history and context setting on the role and impact of the civil service on government hiring. Stay tuned!
This piece originally appeared on the Tech to Gov blog.
